Today a large amount of superfluous traffic exists on the Internet due to the fact that users generally download resources from locations that are further away than the closest identical copy of that same resource.
One common solution to distributed resource (typically file) publication is to use a system of mirrors. A mirror is a complete copy of an entire site (normally an FTP [File Transfer Protocol] site) in another location. The advantage of a mirror is that it provides users who are a long way from the original site quicker access to files. The problem with mirrors is that they rely on the fact that users are aware of their existence. To counter this problem many “mirrored” FTP servers such as Tucows (www.tucows.com) or Sunsite (www.sunsite.com) use a web front end that provides a single entry point. They then ask the user to choose their location and forward them to their closest mirror.
The problem with such approaches is that they are non-standard and thus require a significant development on the part of the mirror owners and they are manual in that users have to manually navigate to the closest mirror. The other problem is that even after navigating to a particular mirror, a user is not guaranteed to find the resource that they require. Finally, such approaches are not dynamic—if a particular mirror is heavily loaded, it may be more efficient to be routed to a mirror which is slightly further away but less heavily loaded.
Another more recent approach is a technology which has come to be known as Peer to Peer (P2P). In this technique a central server is used which contains a list of all resources found on all the clients which are currently on line. If one of the clients requires a file which is located on another client, the P2P server will broker the request, effectively putting the requester in contact with the supplier.
Better P2P products take account of network and client loads in their brokering algorithms, but still have significant drawbacks. The major drawback is that a centralized directory is used for brokering—resulting in a significant reduction in scalability and reliability. Furthermore, P2P solutions don't distinguish between clients and servers, which effectively means that they must serve as well as be served. This socialistic approach, whilst valid for some domains, is not necessarily the ideal approach for secure, reliable delivery of commercial resources.
Due to the inefficiency and wastefulness of common Internet protocols an efficient resource location and retrieval protocol is required.
It is an object of the present invention to satisfy some of the above requirements.